Avalanche Studios is following in the footsteps of so many game developers this year. Today, the company posted a to its website announcing plans for a restructuring. Avalanche said it will close its studio in Liverpool, impacting all staff members in the city. The company said it will also “reduce our workforce and restructure the teams” at its studios in Malmo and Stockholm, but did not provide specifics about the scope of those layoffs.
Although the statement simply credited the decision to “current challenges to our business and the industry,” it’s hard not to think that the cancellation of Avalanche’s planned game Contraband had something to do with the current need to consolidate. Microsoft active development on the project in August during the fallout from the the tech giant announced over the spring and summer. Those cuts appeared to impact the fate of many other upcoming games and game studios that were working with Microsoft as either a developer or a publisher.
Since we won’t get to know them for Contraband, Avalanche Studios will remain best known for its Just Cause games of open-world mayhem for now. Contraband is the only game currently listed as a forthcoming title on the company website, so it’s unclear what the next moves for the remaining team members will be. The notice closes by saying, “Despite these changes, we remain deeply committed to providing amazing games to our passionate player communities.” Hopefully they’ll be able to bounce back.
The newly released Furiosahas the world blazing with Mad Max fever. Some are celebrating the occasion by rewatching 2015’s Fury Road, if not all four movies. Others are thinking about what could’ve been, particularly as it pertains to the 2015 Mad Max game from Just Cause creator Avalanche Studios.
Spoilers of the Week: August 12th
During a recent interview with Gaming Bible at Cannes, franchise director George Miller talked about the game, which he isn’t too hot on. He was candid in calling it “not as good as I wanted it to be.” To him, it failed because the team had to “give all our material” to Avalanche instead of being involved directly, and “I’m one of those people that i’d rather not do something unless you can do it at the highest level, or at least try to make it at the highest level.”
If he had his way, another Mad Max game would happen, but one with Hideo Kojima at the helm. The Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding creator has openly been a fan of Fury Road since it came out, and Miller called him the perfect guy to take on that endeavor. “I’ve just been speaking to him,” the director added. “[But] he’s got so much fantastic stuff in his own head that I would never ask him.” (Kojima, for what it’s worth, saw Furiosa at Cannes and called it a “masterpiece.”)
Avalanche’s Mad Max game launched months after the release of Fury Road, and is in fact set in between that and Beyond Thunderdome. The game got solid reviews when it launched, but the big thing that did it in was releasing on September 1, 2015… aka, the same day as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. When two fairly big games go up against one another on the same day, there’s typically a loser, and in this case, it was ol’ Max Rockatansky.
Here’s where things get a little murky, though: putting Mad Max out on that date was apparently out of Avalanche’s hands. Christofer Sundberg, who co-founded the studio in 2003, revealed on X that Warner Bros. wouldn’t budge when he suggested the game shift from its September 1 release. As a result, “they blamed us for the bad sales and cancelled a bunch of awesome DLC that was just sitting there waiting to be released.” To this day, he admits that he doesn’t know why WB was so adamant about it.
Sundberg also took Miller’s thoughts on his game to task, alleging that WB tried to force Mad Max into a linear game when Avalanche’s bread and butter is big, open-world titles. A year into development, the studio was told to convert it into a non-linear game, and he chalked up Miller’s comments to “complete nonsense and [it] just shows complete arrogance. […] Mad Max was a hell of a great game, the potential was missed due to political nonsense.” And if Kojima did try a stab at making a Max game, he thinks it’d be a “completely different experience.”
In the years since its release, Mad Max has been looked back on fondly and achieved a bit of cult classic status. To date, it’s playable on both PC and consoles via backwards compatibility. Maybe with the franchise being the hot topic of the weekend, the game will see a little more love over the next few days.
